January/February 2016 Issue

ETHIOPIA: Geneticists have sequenced the first prehistoric African genome. The DNA comes from 4,500-year-old remains found in 2012 in a cave in the Ethiopian highlands. After comparing the genome with more than 100 populations from Africa, Europe, and Asia, scientists found, surprisingly, that it includes DNA from a potentially huge migration of farmers from the Middle East into Africa around 3,500 years ago—DNA that spread across the continent, even to groups in South Africa and Congo that had long been considered genetically isolated. —Samir S. Patel

GUAM: One of the most ancient sites in Oceania was recently identified in a wildlife refuge. It dates back around 3,500 years and appears to have been occupied for three millennia by ancestors of the Chamorro, the native culture of the Mariana Islands. The site, called Ritidian, includes many stones from lattes, or megalithic capped columns that were used as foundations for buildings and are unique to the island chain. There are enough latte sets to observe how the home-building style there evolved over time and varied from house to house. —Samir S. Patel

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: It has long been thought that the Austronesian-speaking people from Asia who eventually colonized the remote islands of the Pacific skirted New Guinea and had little influence on the existing culture there, especially in the interior. But new analysis of 12 potsherds from a highland site suggest otherwise. The sherds, the oldest known pottery on New Guinea at 3,000 years old, were locally made, suggesting that Austronesian influence (which includes a pottery-making tradition) made its way up the island’s rugged slopes hundreds of years earlier than once thought. —Samir S. Patel